On Sunday mornings, before one of our 6-mile New York City walks, Chris sits at the green table with an open Hagstrom Map and the AIA Guide and draws a map. He sketches in the streets and churches and adds historic highlights. I search online for a suitable coffee stop, and tell him the cross streets, so he can add that in, and, once in awhile, a used bookstore.

These hand-drawn maps have evolved in style over time. Initially, they were more conventional, hewing closely to map-like reality—criss-crossed with roads, rivers and bridges, and perhaps a tiny coffee cup, pinpointing our café, and a little church steeple and the name of a book store.

Lately, the geographic features have taken on greater prominence, and appear as impressionistic splotches of brightly colored watercolor that signify water, islands or parks. Recently Chris has been adding the names of individual trees because he has a longstanding and ever-growing passion for trees.

Within the structure of this weekly map project, Chris experiments with form, color, light and medium, starting with his Sunday pencil outline and finishing up over the next few days with a fully painted map, which he now posts on a special tumblr.

Yet I see Chris hunched over his Arches watercolor paper on Sunday morning and wonder why and how he continues to make maps week after week. This is a project with no particular outcome or deadline or, at the get-go, any audience besides me, and a fellow walker or two, and yet he continues.

At this stage in his career, Chris has made a steady income and gained professional renown with his children’s books, so perhaps he feels more relaxed about following where another passion leads him; and his passion for mapmaking encapsulates many more of his interests—trees, cities, walks, history, churches, books, shorelines, islands, rivers, oceans, bridges.

But what about all those for whom art and creativity lead nowhere, all the writing and art and doodling and practice and perseverance that vanishes into the “trash” bin or the recycling pile? And what about the non-professional artist in any form starting out?

I get hope from late-blooming artist, Lisa Congdon, whose website I compulsively visit. She gradually became a full-time artist, eventually quitting her day job, by taking on one, structured, self-assigned project after another, a practice that initially had no clear outcome or audience other than, eventually, in her case, the social media sphere, a medium that led to the kind of instant visibility that Chris did not have in the beginning.

One year, Congdon photographed and painted small collections, one per day, picking up hundreds of fans along the way. These were her vintage collections of erasers, doll hands, matchbooks, lotto cards, ornaments, carbon dressmaking paper, matchbook covers and luggage tags. Another year, she set out to improve her skill at hand lettering, by posting hand lettered quotes every day. No one paid her to do this. These were not assignments for others, she says in an interview with Debbie MIllman on Design Matters, rather they were, like Chris’ maps, a project she undertook on her own to improve and practice according to a self-defined routine.

Chris and Congdon have an unusually high bar for working alone, every day, in a room, in a seeming vacuum, without a deadline or clear outcome. They are comfortable, to a greater degree than many people, with risk, and they stay focused. I also believe they derive pleasure from the process. This is key because even though today we have all these outlets for exposure (Instagram, Tumblr, SquareSpace, Twitter, Facebook) we still have to decide what, how often and why we undertake anything, and we still have to work on it first, usually alone, in a room, in a vacuum, every day.